Froebel and the kindergarten movement

Next to Pestalozzi, perhaps the most gifted of early 19th-century educators was Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten movement and a theorist on the importance of constructive play and self-activity in early childhood. He was an intensely religious man who tended toward pantheism and has been called a nature mystic. Throughout his life he achieved very little literary fame, partly because of the style of his prose and philosophy, which is so academic and obscure that it is difficult to read and sometimes scarcely comprehensible.

In early life, Froebel tried various kinds of employment until 1805, when he met Anton Gruner, a disciple of Pestalozzi and director of the normal school at Frankfurt am Main, who persuaded him to become a teacher. After two years with Gruner, he visited Pestalozzi at Yverdon, studied at Göttingen and Berlin, and eventually determined upon establishing his own school, founded on what he considered to be psychological bases. The result in 1816 was the Universal German Educational Institute at Griesheim, transferred the following year to Keilhau, which constituted a kind of educational community for Froebel, his friends, and their wives and children. To this period belongs The Education of Man (1826), his most important treatise, though typical of his obscurantism. In 1831 he was again in Switzerland, where he opened a school, an orphanage, and a teacher-training course. Finally, in 1837, upon returning to Keilhau, he opened his first Kindergarten, or “garden of children,” in nearby Bad Blankenburg. The experiment attracted wide interest, and other kindergartens were started and flourished, despite some political opposition.

The pedagogy of Froebel

Froebel’s pedagogical ideas have a mystical and metaphysicalcontext. He viewed man as a child of God, of nature, and of humanity who must learn to understand his own unity, diversity, and individuality, corresponding to this threefold aspect of his being. On the other hand, man must understand the unity of all things (the pantheistic element).

Education consists of leading man, as a thinking, intelligent being, growing into self-consciousness, to a pure and unsullied, conscious and free representation of the inner law of Divine Unity, and in teaching him ways and means thereto.

Education had two aspects: the teacher was to remove hindrances to the self-development or “self-activity” of the child, but he was also to correct deviations from what man’s experience has taught is right and best. Education is thus both “dictating and giving way.” This means that ordinarily a teacher should not intervene and impose mandatory education, but when a child—particularly a child of kindergarten age—is restless, tearful, or willful, the teacher must seek the underlying reason and try to eradicate the uncovered hindrance to the child’s creative development. Most important, the teacher’s dictating and giving way should not flow from the mood and caprices of the teacher. Behaviour should be measured according to a “third force” between teacher and child, a Christian idea of goodness and truth.

School for Froebel was not an “establishment for the acquisition of a greater or lesser variety of external knowledge”; actually, he thought children were instructed in things they do not need. School instead should be the place to which the pupil comes to know the “inner relationship of things”—“things” meaning God, man, nature, and their unity. The subjects followed from this: religion, language and art, natural history, and the knowledge of form. In all these subjects the lessons should appeal to the pupil’s interests. It is clear that, in Froebel’s view, the school is to concern itself not primarily with the transmission of knowledge but with the development of character and the provision of the right motivation to learn.

Froebel put great emphasis on play in child education. Just like work and lessons, games or play should serve to realize the child’s inner destiny. Games are not idle time wasting; they are “the most important step in the development of a child,” and they are to be watched by the teachers as clues to how the child is developing. Froebel was especially interested in the development of toys for children—what he called “gifts,” devised to stimulate learning through well-directed play. These gifts, or playthings, included balls, globes, dice, cylinders, collapsible dice, shapes of wood to be put together, paper to be folded, strips of paper, rods, beads, and buttons. The aim was to develop elemental judgment distinguishing form, colour, separation and association, grouping, matching, and so on. When, through the teacher’s guidance, the gifts are properly experienced, they connect the natural inner unity of the child to the unity of all things (e.g., the sphere gives the child a sense of unlimited continuity, the cylinder a sense both of continuity and of limitation). Even the practice of sitting in a circle symbolizes the way in which each individual, while a unity in himself, is a living part of a larger unity. The child is to feel that his nature is actually joined with the larger nature of things.

The kindergarten movement

The kindergarten was unique for its time. Whereas the first institutions for small children that earlier appeared in Holland, Germany, and England had been welfare nursery schools or day-care centres intended merely for looking after children while parents worked, Froebel stood for the socializing or educational idea of providing, as he put it in founding his kindergarten, “a school for the psychological training of little children by means of play and occupations.” The school, that is, was to have a purpose for the children, not the adults. The curriculum consisted chiefly of three types of activities: (1) playing with the “gifts,” or toys, and engaging in other occupations designed to familiarize children with inanimate things, (2) playing games and singing songs for the purpose not only of exercising the limbs and voice but also of instilling a spirit of humanity and nature, and (3) gardening and caring for animals in order to induce sympathy for plants and animals. All this was to be systematic activity.

The kindergarten plan to meet the educational needs of children between the ages of four and six or seven through the agency of play thereafter gained widespread acceptance. During the 25 years following Froebel’s death in 1852, kindergartens were established in leading cities of Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Hungary, Japan, Switzerland, and the United States. In Great Britain the term infant school was retained for the kindergarten plan, and in some other countries the term crèche has been used.

Johann Friedrich Herbart was a contemporary of Froebel and other German Romanticists, but he can hardly be put into the ranks of such pedagogues. During his lifetime his sober, systematic “philosophical realism” found little approval; only posthumously, during the latter half of the 19th century, did his work achieve great importance. He is regarded as one of the founders of theoretical pedagogy, injecting both metaphysics and psychology into the study of how people learn.

The psychology and pedagogy of Herbart

As a young man of 18, Herbart had studied at the University of Jena under the idealist philosopher Fichte. It was a long while before he broke from the spell of Fichte’s teachings and turned to philosophical realism, which asserts that underlying the world of appearances there is a plurality of things or “reals.” Change consists simply in the alteration in the relations between these reals, which resist the changed relationships as a matter of self-preservation.

Ideas, like things, always exist and always resist change and seek self-preservation. It is true that some ideas may be driven below the threshold of consciousness; but the excluded ideas continue to exist in an unconscious form and tend, on the removal of obstacles (as through education), to return spontaneously to consciousness. In consciousness there are ideas attracting other ideas so as to form complex systems. These idea masses correspond to the many interests of the individual (such as his home and his hobbies) and to broader philosophical and religious concepts and values. In the course of mental development certain constellations of ideas acquire a permanent dominance that exercises a powerful selective facilitating influence upon the ideas struggling to enter or reenter the consciousness.

In his systematic account of the nature of education, Herbart conceived the process as beginning with the idea masses that the child has previously acquired from experience and from social intercourse. The teacher creates knowledge from the former and sympathy from the latter. The ultimate objective is the formation of character by the development of an enlightened will, capable of making judgments of right and wrong. Moral judgments (like reals) are absolute, springing from contemplation, incapable of proof and not requiring proof. Ethics, in other words, is the ultimate focus of pedagogy.

In the classroom, it is the aim of the lessons to introduce new conceptions, to bind them together, and to order them. Herbart speaks of “articulation”—a systematic method of constructing correct, or moral, idea masses in the student’s mind. First the student becomes involved in a particular problem, and then he considers its context. Each of these two stages has a phase of rest and of progress, and thus there are four stages of articulation: (1) clarification, or the static contemplation of particular conceptions, (2) association, or the dynamic linking of new conceptions with old ones, (3) systematization, or the static ordering and modification of what in the conceptions are deemed of value, and (4) methodization, or the dynamic application and recognition of what has been learned. Herbart phrased this system of instruction only in very general terms, but his successors tended to turn this framework into a rigid schedule that had to be applied to every lesson. Herbart himself warned:

We must be familiar with them [the methods], try them out according to circumstances, alter, find new ones, and extemporize; only we must not be swallowed up in them nor seek the salvation of education there.

The Herbartians

Herbart’s basing of educational methods on an understanding of mental processes or psychological considerations, his view that psychology and moral philosophy are linked, and his idea that instruction is the means to moral judgment had a large place in late 19th-century pedagogical thought. Among Herbart’s followers were Tuiskon Ziller in Leipzig (founder of the Association for Scientific Pedagogy) and Wilhelm Rein in Jena. From 1895 to 1901 a National Herbart Society for the Scientific Study of Education flourished in the United States; John Dewey was a major critic of Herbartianism in its proceedings.

Ziller’s ideas are representative of the Herbartians. He insisted that all parts of the curriculum be closely integrated and unified—history and religion forming the core subjects on which everything else hinged. The sequence of instruction was to be adjusted to the psychological development of the individual, which was seen as corresponding to the cultural evolution of mankind in stages from primitive savagery to civilization. His main goal in education, like that of most Herbartians, was to promote character building, not simply knowledge accumulation.

When the great heterodox University of Berlin was founded in 1809, Fichte became one of its foremost professors and a year later its second rector, having already achieved fame throughout Germany as an idealist philosopher and fervent nationalist. At a time when Napoleon had humbled Prussia, Fichte in Berlin delivered the powerful Addresses to the German Nation (1807–08), full of practical views on national recovery and glory, including suggestions on the complete reorganization of the German schools along Pestalozzian lines. All children would be educated—and would be educated by the state. Boys and girls would be taught together, receiving virtually the same education. There would be manual training in agriculture and the industrial arts, physical training, and mental training, the aim of which would be not simply the transmission of measures of knowledge but rather the instillation of intellectual curiosity and love and charity toward all men. Unlike Pestalozzi, however, Fichte was wary of the influence of parents and preferred educating children in a “separate and independent community,” at least until a new generation of parents had arisen, educated in the new ideas and ideals. Here was an apparent revival of Plato’s idea of a strictly ordered, authoritarian state.

Another of the founders of the University of Berlin (teaching there from 1810 to 1834) was the Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, who sounded a very modern note by offering a social interpretation of education. Education, in his view, was an effort on the part of the older generation to “deliver” the younger generation into the four spheres of life—church, state, social life, and science. Education, however, not only assumes its organization in terms of these four areas of life but also serves to develop and influence these areas.

Perhaps more than any other individual, the philologist and diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt was responsible for the founding of the University of Berlin. Supported by the king of Prussia, Frederick William III, he adopted for it principles that raised it to a foremost place among the universities of the world—the most important principle being that no teacher or student need adhere to any particular creed or school of thought. This academic freedom survived in Germany despite its temporary suspension and Humboldt’s dismissal by a reactionary Prussian government in 1819. Philosophically and pedagogically, Humboldt was himself a humanist—a part of a wave of what were called new humanists—who reasserted the importance of studying the classical achievements of humanity in language, literature, philosophy, and history. The aim of education in these terms was not the service of society or the state but rather the cultivation of the individual.

French theorists

At this time there were two men in France who were making their names through the introduction of new methods—Jean-Joseph Jacotot and Édouard Séguin. Jacotot was a high school teacher, politician, and pedagogue, whose main educational interests focused on the teaching of foreign languages. “You learn a foreign language,” he said, “as you learn your mother-language.” The pupil is confronted with a foreign language; he learns a text in the language almost by heart, compares it with a text in his own native language, and then tries gradually to free himself from the comparison of texts and to construct new combinations of words. The teacher controls this learning by asking questions. “My method is to learn one book and relate all the others to it.” The learning of grammar came later.

Jacotot’s method emphasized first the practical side and then the rule, constant repetition, and self-activity on the part of the pupils. Controversy arose, however, over his two basic theses: (1) that everyone has the same intelligence, differences in learning success being only a case of differences in industry and stamina, and (2) that everything is in everything: “Tout est dans tout,” which suggests that any subject or book is analogous to any other.

The doctor and psychologist Édouard Séguin developed a pedagogy for pupils of below-average intelligence. Historically, scientific attempts to educate mentally retarded children had begun with the efforts of a French doctor, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, during the latter part of the 18th century. In his classic book, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (1801), Itard related his five-year effort to train and educate a boy found, at about the age of 11, running naked and wild in the woods of Aveyron. Later, Séguin, a student of Itard, devised an educational method using physical and sensory activities to develop mental processes. Limbs and the senses were, in his view, a part of the whole personality, and their development was a part of the whole human education. His method was a specific adaptation of the idea that the development of intellectual and moral distinctions grows out of sensory experience.